Singapore Airlines needs to watch its back. There's a new world's longest flight on the horizon—direct on Australian airline Qantas between London and Sydney. That's 300 passengers, in a metal tube, sitting around for 20 hours and 20 minutes in the sky—and Qantas's CEO Alan Joyce says the airline is getting very close to pulling it off by 2022, Bloomberg reports.

About a year ago, Qantas put out an open call to Boeing and Airbus to outfit a plane that could handle the ultra-long-haul hop, dubbing the endeavor 'Project Sunrise.' Yesterday, Joyce told Bloomberg, "We’re now comfortable that we think we have vehicles that could do it." While there are technical challenges to flying so far for so long, the planes themselves aren't really the hold-up: It's a toss-up between the Airbus A350 and the Boeing 777X series (set to begin deliveries at the end of 2019), and the airline is being coy about which it will eventually go with. Whichever company Qantas chooses, the real obstacle to convincing passengers to board a plane for almost an entire day is making it comfortable enough.

Joyce hinted that Project Sunrise could usher in a whole new line of in-flight amenities to make 20 hours seem like a breeze. "We’re challenging ourselves to think outside the box,” he told Bloomberg. “Would you have the space used for other activities—exercise, bar, creche [Ed. note: That's Commonwealth for "nursery"], sleeping areas, and berths? Boeing and Airbus have been actually quite creative in coming up with ideas.”

What at least one of those elements could look like has already been revealed. Back in April, Airbus and aerospace design firm Zodiac unveiled a concept that converted a plane's cargo hold into a pod-like sleeping area, putting a whole new spin on first class. While, at the time, Airbus said it hoped to outfit a fleet of long-haul A330s with the modular sleeping area by 2020 with no direct allusion to Project Sunrise, Joyce did chime in, telling Bloomberg in April that he was imagining "a new four-class structure, with part of the cargo hold utilized for beds.”

If the first London-Sydney and New York-Sydney (18 hours) flights are put into operation by 2022, Qantas hopes to use it as proof of concept for more longer-than-long-haul trips across the world from its remote corner of the planet. If you for some reason don't think the airline is serious about making long trips a major part of its route network, think again: Just this March, Qantas operated the first direct flight from Australia to the U.K., a 17-hour slog from Perth to London. To put that into perspective, it's a trip that once took 12-and-a-half days.

All that is to say, while Qantas might be temporarily unseated from its longest flight in the world title when Singapore relaunches its 19-hour Newark-Singapore route in October, it looks like it'll be just three years before it gets it back—with bunk beds to boot.